Jodi Melnick: Like Water Made Human

Each January, the Association of Performing Arts presenters holds a conference in New York, and many dance companies and choreographers plan performances during that time in order to pique the attendees’ interest. This year, for the second time, the Joyce partnered with the Gotham Arts Exchange to present “Focus Dance,” a sampler of works by eight choreographers, on four separate programs. One of the choreographers at the Joyce was Jodi Melnick, who showed a reworked version of her 2012 piece “Solo, Deluxe Version,” here called “Solo, (Re)Deluxe Version.”

As Melnick moved in her opening solo, the stage was bare except for some musical instruments and equipment arranged in the upstage-left corner, and the rear brick wall was exposed; the only flash came from the silver hooded jacket that Melnick wore with her tan pants. She moved easily in the silence, a Trisha Brown-like quality detectable in the freedom and nimbleness of her explorations of the space around her, from a lightly slashing leg to little waving hands to a soft leap down the diagonal. Her dancing has a kind of inevitability, but it never seems rehearsed; it just seems to gather momentum as it develops. Even when phrases were repeated, it was as though Melnick was deciding to do so on the spur of the moment. After drawing us in this way, she slowed, suddenly, as though coming to herself, but didn’t quite stop. Four musicians from the group People Get Ready came on and began playing a loud composition for guitar, drums, and keyboard, and Melnick began dancing again, until a blackout.

When the lights came back up, Melnick continued on, introducing a funny walk downstage, with swivelling hips and awkwardly placed legs, and a frantic shaking of her hands, a rough action in an otherwise placid landscape. As Melnick moved to the fading strains of guitar, two other dancers, Hristoula Harakas and Stuart Shugg, entered and kneeled in a line and watched her, as though absorbing her wisdom. When she ended up on the floor, crawling, they followed along, then danced a low trio with her, their big shadows playing on the brick wall behind them. Melnick walked behind the musicians and shucked her jacket, revealing a simple beige shirt, and rejoined Harakas, as Shugg crawled into the wings. As the music shifted into a strong electronic beat, the women moved in unison to it, the stepped-up rhythm doing nothing to diminish the combined control and looseness that mark Melnick’s choreography.

Throughout “Solo, (Re)Deluxe Version,” mini-dramas—of friendship, or something deeper—unfolded and slipped away, with the onstage musicians adding another character to the goings on. Delicate, poignant guitar passages melted into percussive sections; soothing repetitive tones gave way to strident riffs. Jon Kinzel—like Melnick, a longtime fixture of the New York dance world—had a spare, intimate face-to-face duet with Shugg as the two women, Melnick seated on Harakas’s back, watched, accompanied by the musicians’ simple a-cappella vocals. A bit later, Melnick and Kinzel danced a beautiful duet of almost-partnering, in which time and again the two almost touched but never quite did, communicating in a language of tentativeness, or fear. But Melnick knows when to let this conceit go, and the moment that Melnick finally put her hand on Kinzel’s shoulder was full of relief and tenderness, even if—or especially because—Melnick didn’t emphasize it. The work had plenty of touching, in fact, but it was always gentle, as soft as the movement of Melnick’s arms in the air.

A jauntiness kept reappearing, much of it in movement led by the hips. There were versions of the walk that Melnick did early on (Melnick, Kinzel, and Shugg did a little hip-wiggle walk in a trio late in the piece); positions in which one hip was thrust out exaggeratedly (notably, in a repeated movement in which a dancer stood upright, the arms in classical third-position port de bras, and canted out over the right hip); and moments when it functioned as a support (Melnick did a little hop and ended up seated on Kinzel’s hip in their duet). And then there were the sweetly waving hands that cropped up from time to time.

Another motif suggested a darker side: one arm curled over the head and drew it down to the chest as the other arm folded into the body—a fetal position while standing, a hiding in plain sight. We saw it in Melnick’s opening solo, and it showed up again near the end, in a striking section made up of two simultaneous duets. To an eerie drone augmented by a rattling sound, the women, at stage left, pushed off the brick wall after falling gently against it, or paused and looked at it; the men, on the other side, ventured downstage in a unison walk, a slight hip flick once again contributing to the pattern. The duets then shifted, the women moving away from the wall with their own particular walk and the men sticking close to it, half in shadow. Once the men exited, the women retreated to the wall again, and, standing side by side, moved from shape to shape, never in unison, until suddenly they both stopped in identical positions, the left hand behind the head and the straight right arm raised toward a high horizon to the side, their eyes following that trajectory. They paused there a long time, seeming to consider their common purpose, then started up again, out of synch. Harakas sank to the ground as Melnick kept on moving, bringing the thirty-five-minute work to an unsettling, melancholy end.

Melnick is an intelligent choreographer, with an admirably pared-down aesthetic and a keen sense of how to compose stage pictures. There seemed nothing extraneous in “Solo, (Re)Deluxe Version,” and we were free to enjoy the soft elegance of the dancers and the focussed energy of the musicians. Melnick herself consistently drew the eye. She is like water made human. While in motion, she has an ease and a suppleness that bring to mind a brook running smoothly over rocks, or waves gently breaking on the shore; when still, her body is like a clear lake, containing much life and history in its depths.

Photograph by Ian Douglas/New York Live Arts.

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